- The synergiesClick → The synergies had dates in the model, but no one's job depended on hitting them.
- The diligence numberClick → An early guess became the budget, and the budget became the promise you made.
- The synergy delayClick → Your integration timeline slips, and the synergies modeled against it never land.
- Two ERPsClick → Both sides run their own ERP. Nobody will choose, and you pay for two every month.
- The extensionClick → The TSA ends before you are off the seller's systems, and the seller sets the price.
- The resetClick → Integration cost blew past what you signed off on, and now you explain it to the board.
- The buried costClick → Diligence priced the business the parent described, not the one you're buying.
- The next dealClick → The next deal signs while the last one is still running, and nobody has time for both.
- The spin-outClick → The division you're selling has never had its own numbers. A buyer discounts the price.
- The holdoutsClick → Two of the acquisitions still run their own systems, and nobody ever decided that.
- The diligence findingClick → A diligence finding you knew about costs more in price than it would have cost in cash.
- The integration credibilityClick → A status report that's always green stops being one you can actually trust.
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You decide where we come in. Some engagements are a single phase — a diligence read, an exit from a transition services agreement (TSA), one system consolidation. Others run the whole arc, where the party that priced the deal is the party accountable for hitting the number. And some sponsors want diligence and delivery kept apart on purpose, so the firm that produced the estimate is not the firm delivering against it.
Before you sign, and before you sell
What a business is worth and what it costs to separate it are two different numbers. The second one is often missing from the data room. The cost is in the disentangling — contracts that stay behind, undocumented systems, and data that has to move before anything else can. We work that out against the deal deadline, so the number we give you is one we can deliver against. You get it in time to change what you offer, or whether you offer at all.
How much room you have depends on when you start. Eighteen months out, there can be time to fix what a buyer would discount for. Six months out, there may only be time to have the evidence ready. A buyer can price for what they cannot see just as readily as for what is broken. We run the diligence on you first, and hand you the list in the order a buyer will find it.
Selling a piece of the business doesn't take its costs with it. Shared services, licenses, infrastructure and the people who ran them stay on your books, and they land in full the day the transition revenue stops. Some come out quickly, some are tied to contracts with their own dates, and some were always going to be yours. Working out which is which before you sign lets you price the deal against the cost base you'll keep.
After close
Some things have to be yours the morning after close — payroll, order entry, invoicing, the ability to buy something. Where the rest goes has to be decided based on what the business needs. Work stood up in a hurry can end up being redone properly later and paid for twice; work left with the seller too long can cost in other ways. We draw that line before close where there is time, and redraw it afterward where there is not.
An extension gets treated as a negotiation at the end of the clock, when what decides it may have been settled months earlier — whether the seller's people could see your progress, and whether your program added to their week or took work off it. The half you don't control is the seller's situation: a seller in growth mode may help, one under pressure may price your delay. Ask early which services they'd struggle to carry; the answer can change the order you work in.
Which system survives gets argued on capability, then settled by revenue, data and the calendar — and sometimes the answer is neither, with one new instance stood up for both sides. Whichever way it goes, the work that follows may be less about configuration than about the data that has to move, which is one place these programs run late. A legacy environment may not be ready in one pass. We build and cut over as well as plan it, so that risk goes into the schedule instead of surfacing in testing.
A synergy case can rest on something technical that nobody has been made responsible for — one set of numbers both companies report from, one order process, one customer record. By the time it matters, the deal team may have moved on and the people left are running two businesses rather than merging them. Where that has happened, we pick it up, determine what it takes, and give you a straight answer on whether the number in the model is still there.
Across all of it
Where a deal is handed between firms at each phase, the assumptions may not travel with it, and what diligence priced can differ from what integration ends up building. One accountable party across the arc closes that gap. Where your team or an integrator is doing the building, the plan, the budget and the reporting line can still sit with us. We resell nothing, and we will tell you when a date is not real.
Sponsor reporting can end up bought with headcount — analysts whose whole job is producing the weekly pack. That pack can build itself: one source of truth, dashboards that stay current because they are live, an alert that reaches the owner three days before a date slips rather than a week after. The people it frees go back on the program, and what you read stops being a week out of date.
A deal doesn't put your regulatory or contractual obligations on hold. But the people who keep the access records and the approvals are being divided between two companies, and for a stretch nobody owns the job. Evidence stops being collected without anyone deciding to stop collecting it. Keeping a named owner on it through the transition is what leaves you with an unbroken record the next time someone looks.
Whether you want one party across the whole deal or an independent read on one part of it, we start in the same place: what it costs to execute, what has to work on day one, and whether the clock is real. You get an answer you can take to your sponsor either way. Start there →
Four months gone. Nothing done. Fourteen left on the clock.
- 6 mobuild to go-live
- ¼the resourcing
A $300M carve-out off a system first built in 1978, four plants live in one blackout week — hypercare complete two months before the TSA deadline. Read what happened →
on qualifying projects, a portion of the engagement effort may be capitalizable rather than expensed. Worth confirming with your finance team.
If you're the sponsor, not the operator.
Dates are set against your clock and the value creation plan behind it. You hear about a date at risk while there's still room to act, not in the month-end pack afterward.
The documentation, the decisions and the reasoning behind them are produced as the work happens rather than written up at the end — so when the next buyer's team reads it cold, it holds. See how →
The same senior leader and the same standard across platforms, whether it's a first carve-out or a fifth bolt-on. The second platform starts from what the first one built, not from zero.
In a sponsor-backed company the CEO, the board and the sponsor want different things on the same Tuesday. We agree in writing who we report to before we start, and we don't work around it later. When those three disagree, you already know whose call we take. See how we set it →
Three other ways in
Design · build · both
Not sure we're a fit? Not sure where to start?
Both are good reasons to call.
Start a conversation →- Technology & operational due diligence — buy-side & sell-side
- Carve-outs, divestitures & separation execution
- Bolt-on & platform roll-up integration
- IT disentanglement & entangled-asset inventory
- Standalone & one-time cost modeling
- Stranded cost takeout
- TSA scoping, governance & exit
- Day 1 readiness & standalone operations
- Post-merger integration & IMO/SMO leadership
- ERP consolidation, data migration & cutover
- Synergy tracking & value creation plan (VCP)
- Exit readiness & vendor due diligence (VDD)
- Sponsor & board reporting
- Regulatory & contractual continuity
- Serial acquisition & integration capacity
- Integration budget & estimate validation
- Independent program assurance
- Transformation Management Office (TMO)
- Carve-out readiness assessment
- Separation blueprint & Day 1 gating
- Integration playbook & repeatable model
- Sell-side separation support
- Reverse TSA scoping & governance
- Data room build & diligence response